


A Battery of Signals

by cordialcount



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Forgery, Mal Was Right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:15:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She's only another forger, not a replacement for me," Mal says.</p><p>Dom stares at her, steady as a fort on the San Andreas Fault. "Then," he asks, "has she been a replacement for me, all along?"</p><p>(Film-was-a-dream AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Battery of Signals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilredridinghood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilredridinghood/gifts).



There's another woman wearing her body, Mal thinks. 

Perhaps not. Mal knows about revolutions, the flow rate of Somnacin, the flap of a good white coat, but not the history of the impostor raising a constellation of goosebumps along her shoulders. Perhaps it is a man inside the curls and crow's feet Dom sees bowed over him, leaning against the headboard. 

Dom's eyes open and blink twice. The blinds provide a mockery of shade; California sun streams over linoleum and stubble. He looks ordinary, as if he had woken beside her on any Saturday morning, lit under their half-wall of bedroom glass. 

"I am," he says, or that is what Mal hears over the rasp. "I'm—"

"If you were truly sorry, you would have come to me, or said something to me." She presses his arm back to the proper height for the IV before he recovers the presence of mind to fumble with the cat's cradle of tubing. And because she has been reckless, anyway, and she can imagine herself on Dr. Aurora's couch— _reckless with joy, I loved him so_ , she'd confess, a hand curling under his knee—Mal says, "I took your pocket watch, and shattered it on the railing. I could see how long I had been waiting for you."

He smiles. It's a tight smile. He doesn't need to widen it to sink it through her chest, there is so much fear in it already, and hope that in its wobbling fragility becomes all the more valuable. "I dreamed about you, every day." 

Whatever he is searching for is not under the sheets. There by the scrabbling of his thumb she slips her fingers close, strokes them over the soft unscarred skin of his arm, but it's not what she ought to do. Dreamshare may have given her fifty years with him, but she cannot weigh that against this numerically like the mortgage against square footage. Between her and Dom and the world they built this latest dream comes down. A dizzying veil. She reconsiders whether the room's amnesiac is the one hooked to fourteen beeping machines, and the one forgotten listening to the slow labor of his breaths.

"Not me," Mal says. "She was a forge," she says, and the knowledge spreads across his face, but not into the clench of his fist, his nails a displaced misery in her palm. He looks away. The same inclination that makes Dom, instead of the dozen others who wanted to work with Miles' protégé, a fantastic architect and her partner landed him not-asleep in this room. He judges quickly, almost always accurately. It's difficult to ask him to unlearn his convictions. 

Another maintenance cart rattles past the window. Out of the clacking surfaces an image of trains, her and Dom watching them go by. _There is no life for us at its destination,_ he'd said, once. _The only way forward is to refuse to take the way out_.

So the nurses are knocking, with an increasing disregard for Quiet Hours, but she won't foist him off on their inquiries and bedpans. Some girl cleverly glides in without waiting for assent. Mal rallies long enough to catch red hair, dark eyes, and a nametag, and tries not to let Allison's economical sweep through the room remind her of projections. She does let the hospital fade from focus, the room cocoon itself in silence; it's easy in dreams, even easier out of them. In life the only one controlling your consciousness is you. 

Dom's throat moves. Grief, maybe, for the children he and the PASIV created, or practicing how real air flows over the tonsils, or just the beginning of a yawn. If this man sinking almost imperceptibly lower into the bed is Dom, Dom as he's meant to be, her attention on him will be reflexive. He'll snap to her—Limbo together changes you. 

Mal waits. She can feel a long litany of ascertainments coming, the struggle to construct an identity that isn't only a sum of memories. Being Mal for someone who isn't her Dom terrifies her.

"Honey, I can't be sure of anything," he says, at last. The endearment tells her nothing; the doubt isn't him at all. She wonders what checklist he has finished running in his head.

"You've never been very good at lying." The room is beginning to smell like lemons again. Etiquette says she should segue to dinner or the weather, but she turns over this impulse that most people would call kindness. The truth presents itself, startling in its acidity: evasion isn't _Mal_. "I'll forgive you, we'll be all right, we can talk about all of the things we need to. I only must know this, Dom. Who was she?"

 

* * *

 

"The Charles job," Mal says. "There was an extractor you had never heard of, wasn't there? Not a colleague of a colleague?"

Dom rubs his eyes. Physically, he has recovered at a speed the doctors term a miracle. From that word Mal learns that they think he faked it—somehow the exhaustion wasn't genuine. Nor the unwillingness to mark himself an outpatient and drop with her into the next continent, or the last century, or the head of the neighbor with a penchant for inverted colors. 

"All of my sources told me no one had inconvenient grudges. Charles was a snap, apple pie. Did yours say anything different?"

"No."

"There you go," Dom says. "Could you ask the nice attendant to bring me some aspirin?"

There's a package wedged in the mail slot when they return to the Cobb house. _I only forged_ you, says the note in Courier New. Mal decides the accompanying vials labeled Somnacin are a joke, and she pours the contents of all but one into the toilet.

 

* * *

 

Mal saws into her omelette. The edges are so burnt they don't even crunch, the center still more pitiable. Dom only cooks when he has something to prove. In this case it is his dedication to a happy life with her, which is why she should not have let him, but too late; breakfast is on the veranda, the spring breeze an intrepid thief of her hat and napkins. 

Before The Dream—Dom has refused to go under since the last dream, which gives it the nasty intonation of last and final—they would have laughed together at the fluttering paper and cloth. Now Dom's brows furrow when she brushes her hair free, like he doesn't like it but cannot say why. "It's only a small request, a few minutes, it is not hard. All you have to do is choose to help me." 

"I will always choose you, you know that." Yet his hands tighten. "And you deserve to know. Of course." 

"You keep telling yourself that, yet you refuse to provide simple evidence by showing me," she says, and oh, his features shift at that. There are so many lines she can only find by striking them. This aversion to explaining who forged Mal for him is the first and most vexing. "I will not run from whoever it was, and we can hunt them and extract from them why they did it. I only need to see the replica as you saw her."

"You're the best at this." His conciliatory tone has her feeling the chill of her orange juice more than its temperature warrants. They've been talking about university work, whether they should try another round of gonadotropins, how to dispose of the spices arranged in a dusty crosshatching of jars, everything she can think of until the morning turned warm. She has made it challenging for him to withdraw to the kitchen. "I should be moving on, trying something new. I will miss it, but you don't have to, Mal, I know without a shadow of a doubt that you are too talented to need me in there with you."

"Please don't try to reframe the discussion," she says. "I can't be fine pretending to be other people. Not when my own husband can't show me who he believes I am." 

It is a vicious shot, and she tries not to think less of herself for it. Dreamshare's potential to ruin people had been noted even before the technology had graduated from the academic toybox. If she hadn't thought she and Dom would be safe—no, not safe. No one is. Yet had she not been certain they were sufficiently safe for her to come home and feel dreaming, the exquisite rigor of timing and the intimation of violence, close into her like an unneeded blade into a sheath, she would not have paid a fair price for their own PASIV. Meaning expensive; it would have been disrespectful, otherwise.

"I need time to prepare," he concedes. "She rooted deep because I thought she was you—" the implications of that give her hope "—and I don't want to sabotage us by melding her and you."

Mal's plate is a junkyard of egg fritters. She stands up and walks around to Dom's hanging chair, eases herself into the wicker, reaches for his elbow and fits it over her shoulder. She is so close she can see the minute cracks on his skin, where the space between each fissure widens over his knuckles and narrows over the back of his hand. The cracks are still dry and deep from the air recycling of the hospital. She lays kisses along his neck, wanting to be convinced he remembers: for her to want him is to want him to be dangerous. 

It's not comfortable when he tilts in, scoots backward to not squash his hips against the armrest, and lifts her wrist. Some dreamers periodically relocate their injections, disguising the punctures under their shirts or between their toes. One researcher had admitted she kept a calendar for the rotation. Dom had been, foremost, a dreamer, and proud of its consequences. 

Mal has a second to anticipate the absence of pain before it is unmistakable. Her wrist is not sore despite the pressure of his lips. She has not dreamed for long enough that the bruises have melted into invisibility. "It should hurt," she says to herself, without confidence he will understand. Her heel scrapes the chair to a stop.

"Mal, don't go," he says. "I know I've—been rough on you." He catches her around the waist, touching her as she has avoided touching him, worried he would associate it with her doppelganger. She leans into his stained collar and waits again for him to speak. They rock in silence. All these waking weeks she has spent waiting; the slow progression from one happening to the next no longer feels like exposure.

"It will," he adds, finally, and something tumbles into place, as if the hour-hand on Dom's new watch is ticking to a significant time and not 10:43 and spare seconds, and the bird feeder is not empty of birds.

"I'll hold you to it," she says. In all its meanings. She loves him, despite, because. 

His answering twist of the mouth looks enough like Dom to set something in her breast a-twinging. It arrives softly, a faint pang; and then it is very sharp.

 

* * *

 

If she is honest with herself, it goes horribly. Every nerve Dom has seems strained to its limit when he hooks himself to the PASIV, although he assures her that she isn't forcing him into this. They will get nowhere if she doesn't trust his judgment. What she gets out of this particular attempt is the aching sense of denial, like her reservation has been stolen and a maître d'hôtel must inform her, regretfully but firmly, that her place has already been occupied by someone bearing her name and dress and voice.

"Now that we know I'm unconsciously erecting barriers against duplicates," Dom tells her, "we need to keep trying until I recognize you as the original," but she knows that in the short term that's a fantasy.

The margins of their contact book brim with names. Mal visits garages, the information dealers both conspicuous and anonymous in sunglasses and blazers. She calls Arthur until he inserts in his voicemail a code for _no news_. She falls asleep to it, smothering her phone in the pillow so Dom won't be the subject of speculation from two feet away, his face hidden in sweat-smudged blankets. Arthur accepts with foreseeable equanimity that Dom has been projecting him and mentions dryly that he would like to meet his projection, if possible and convenient, and of course he will help her track down the Mal Two who encouraged Dom to create Arthur Two.

"No one was interested in Dominic Cobb," says Arthur, "in particular," and so do Sarah and Meijin and Yusuf, the sources Arthur procures for her. The net widens. Whoever performed a vanishing trick on Dom's ability to dream didn't mean it personally, after all, even if their employers did. Everyone but Mal respects Dom. She loves him, a form distinct.

Yusuf trades stacks of dossiers for the remaining vial. Many parties are interested in the mystery chemical: Mal almost, but not quite, regrets discarding tens of thousands of dollars' worth of information in one thin stream, insubstantial as light on the tiles spattered with soap. Viciousness has neither weight nor volume. 

"This is Saito." Mal follows him to his penthouse on a drizzly evening, and while her forger's instincts see in him the practicality and means to disable Dom—and by extension herself, the thought delicate and painful, an acknowledgement of the mortality of her own mind—she doesn't see, in the stylized composition of his nagajuban and suit jacket, the brilliance born of desperation. Ellie, same. Letsego, another like Saito. Every extractor and client whose Excel cell she color-fills is a step toward a solution, and the community mobilizes around her in a way she cannot help softening at, but the distance between her and Dom grows. It is the distance that matters.

"I have every reason to want you to dream," she says, more than once over April and May. The hook of displeasure appears many times around Dom's mouth as he works himself down from shouting. Their living room spends most of its time festooned in pizza boxes and squabbles. "You are my architect. You drop down with me, and you wake me up, when the dream threatens not to wake me on its own. I should never," she says, swallowing, "have watched you enter that dream yourself and left, however convenient you judged it to be."

He swallows too, more slowly, buying time, but at least he hasn't retreated to his office. Dom rarely leaves the house. The stack of euphemisms for _persuaded targets to hand over proof of their darkest affairs_ grows in the file cabinet more quickly than he sends them out. Even the internet has not invented an appropriate bullet point for _shot a man, or several, with their own imaginary guns_.

"What's done is done. Isn't the Castillo auction opening this weekend?" 

"A bronze, a painting. How can you brush me off with these?"

He rises and paces. "I will support you, regardless of the career I personally take. You don't trust me to be devoted to you, and you won't admit it. Word is, your father said I was an inadequate choice."

"You're wrong," she says, not allowing her mind to question her own certainty. She files the dispute away under _old married couple argument_. "You are half of a team. That is why I cannot leave you behind."

"Mal." Mal, and Mal—he repeats it like it is a weapon of his own devising.

 

* * *

 

Yusuf invites her to the Rosewood when he wins. The names of the amber bottles that crop up by his snapping fingers hint at extravagance, Yusuf's generosity to her with her own money.

"I do not treat my work as a competition," he declares earnestly. His main motivation is professional worth and a distant second the money, but his smile adopts the exact shape Mal would give it were she forging the broker doing a victory lap. 

A touchscreen materializes out of his coat, the simmer of old smoke tucking away the particulars of Yusuf's movement. This video shows an actress and amateur draftswoman named Anna, Amelie, Allison, etcetera. What seizes Mal is the liquidity of her spine, which Mal can only call efficiently arrogant, and the red hair, the dark eyes that once caught hers and slid away. You have seen her, Yusuf says, she is registered as an orderly at Keller Hospital. Ariadne, Dom had said, she had a strong handshake. 

Extraction exploits the plausibility of coincidence. In life, Mal doesn't believe this is one. "Thank you, mon cher," she says. Yusuf finds the pretense amusing.

He shrugs. She notices his nails are unevenly bitten when he drums them on the bar counter. Dreams do not require that level of detail. "You prefer not to have backup, yes? Your elegance must be in your planning."

Mal observes the corners of his eyes, decides it is only his brand of friendliness. _You will be safe_ , she thinks. _You know what you have to do to be at peace with yourself, and only that will keep you safe._

"You don't need the Beretta," Arthur says, when she confirms with him the practical details. "You won't need elaborate precautions. She's a complete amateur, drawn into dreaming for the first time."

"Someone chose to wreck my husband. They chose to make dreaming unthinkable for him."

She sees his hand reaching for hers and picks up her glass in lieu of determining how to accept it. They have been friends for years. He will be fine with her avoiding this. "She doesn't have ties to anyone, Mal. They picked a random lady off the street. What I'm saying is, that's a smart option for your hypothetical backer, only you and I know how good Yusuf is at tracing people when he's not passing himself off as a period piece. But she's not paying attention to loose ends. If you watch someone for a week and they don't see it, they won't." 

The knob of his wrist bumps against his whiskey, one shot for relaxation. She can almost feel the blaze of the liquor on her tongue, the itch of wanting to forge, to single out Arthur's life and try it.

"She might disguise her recognition. I would, if I thought I might be threatened. I could trap them closer."

"She doesn't have your commitment, though. She's trying dreamshare, and we—it can be intoxicating." His glass clinks gently against her cranberry juice. "If she wants you to get close, I don't think she would be luring you in only to scare you off for keeps."

"I thought you would be the one to advise overpreparation, Arthur."

He shrugs. "I'm a fan of good equipment. And better team members. I didn't get into mind crimes because I liked excessive force."

 

* * *

 

Reasonably, the meeting could have gone no differently, but afterward Mal will still feel affronted by it. She changes by the sofa, choosing practical over intimidating, and tiptoes toward the kitchen before seeing what time it is. Simultaneous sleep/consciousness breaks the circadian rhythms; she never wakes early without an alarm. This Ariadne doesn't either, Arthur says, for more mundane reasons. She works a late shift. Mal drives to the back door of Ariadne's rehearsal space and flips calmly through the book Dom gave her.

A woman passes the car. Mal offers a brief dip of her head, not encouraging the only possible witness to linger on the quiet street. 

The engine has been comfortably dead for twenty minutes when the window shatters.

Mal does not share Arthur's bad habit of being used to incidents like this. Nonetheless, she has an instinctive sense of intervals, the fractional hesitation between event and awareness, the inches from her hands to the door handle. She grabs for it while glass sprinkles itself over her seat like crumbs from Dom's cookies. Five seconds later she is on the asphalt, cursing her lack of pre-prepared escape routes. People are her specialty. Exploiting the architecture is—one she will need someone for.

"Stop," she hears. "Hey, Mrs. Cobb—"

The sound-memory of the window cracking passes through her in the same moment. It was something handheld, not a projectile. The more distance between her and the object, the less likely someone can hit her. Mal swings herself up with the hubcap and takes off down the street, appreciating her trousers and sandals and the onlooker who, she sneaks a glance over her shoulder, has taken it upon herself to wander between her and her assailant. She runs by an alleyway, a gutted storefront. A strip of June-parched grass. A motorcycle. And then there is a flash of red hair, and the motorcycle has a rider. 

Directions turn treacherous. _Down_ mutates into _up_. She finds a knot of grass on her nose and the air knocked out of her as Ariadne half-smiles and turns the bike.

Even through her brain's frantic attempts to pump blood where she does not need it, she can see the girl Ariadne has turned toward from the corner of her left eye. What Mal sees is lean muscles, crossed arms; blonde; frowning; and something in the pinched angles of her brow and cheeks that suggests the disappointment of reeling in a wriggle on the line, only to discover the lure itself has come alive. In the rippling slant of afternoon light she looks almost warm, a sparely built seventeen or twenty, strands of her hair loose like muslin. "Why won't you face me, huh?" 

Mal does, thinking, _Ah, it was you_.

Ariadne nudges her with a foot. "It isn't right to leave Mrs. Cobb here. We should give her a ride elsewhere, talk to her when she can do it without coughing on my shoes."

The girl examines Mal. "Nothing's broken. I just—wanted to see, what you were like by yourself," she says, in the hesitant way of someone sounding out something for the first time. "We'll chat tomorrow." 

Mal breathes, not trusting herself to talk. She will remember the word that comes to mind, then, meeting those eyes, unable to convince herself this girl is not a child: hunger. Its associated concepts. She hasn't dreamt since February.

"We're splitting now," the girl concludes. "Come on, Ariadne. I'll get you paid."

A card lands by Mal's ear. She wearily props herself up on her elbows as Ariadne and the girl vault onto the motorcycle. Line one on the card is _Phillipa_ with no last name and no laboratory or university affiliation. Then a number, and in an embossed gold serif Mal thinks is a statement of bravado, a single word. _Forger_. 

"Phillipa," she yells down the street. At last the fury flattened by months of adrenaline is upon her, but she has been left alone to drag herself to the car and hurt. She brushes the glass out with a newspaper and only as much force as necessary. She doesn't draw the gun under the passenger seat, wondering why her anger is not aimed at Phillipa at all, why it flashes through her and washes out like a summer storm.

 

* * *

 

"You can't," Dom says. Mal is lying across him on their sofa, two fingers crooked in the belt loop of his jeans. "I'm not going to watch you charge into the lair of someone who tried to kill you."

"That's not why she jumped on me. Trust me, Dom, can you not take a leap of faith—" his scrutiny of her breaks "—you know this is what I _do_. And you needn't be so dramatic."

He doesn't respond. He has bent over her to put his pen down and roll between his fingers a small top. Mal can't count how many of these little souvenirs he's obtained, the leftovers from business proposals. She went with him at first, trying to be good to him, sensitive, the things he couldn't verbally request of her; but the difference between the glances he gave her and the prospective venture partners was plain, and she only mirrored Dom's apathy for it all. _You don't have to,_ she had wanted to say, mesmerized by his smiles without their dimples. _I can save you._

"It's a phone number, not a threat."

"I saw the package. The one she shoved into our _home_. What, what are we supposed to call that?"

The threads she has been picking at converge, condense. "I think it was meant as apology."

"Well, she's not very good at them."

Mal lets that settle in until he flushes. He clears his papers. The business artifacts—she wants them to be a vice historical, to dig for dream treasure with him, rub bullseyes of dirt onto his laughing throat—go in a drawer. He holds his hands out, as though asking for alms. "Do you think I can look at her and not see you?"

"She's only another forger, not a replacement for me," Mal says.

Dom stares at her, steady as a fort on the San Andreas Fault. "Then," he asks, "has she been a replacement for me, all along?"

Her heart tips with his. "I would never," she says: this is right. The subject has been broached. "You're not thinking—" She does not kiss his forehead. They are not there, not yet. "How could you believe—"

 _That's what she told him_ , Mal realizes, _she could kick out without him_ , before he says it himself, the air heavy with more than his exhale. She understands why he made the businessman who needed him, the other projections, in the dream he cannot take her into. Perhaps she should feel angry, but the frantic drive is gone and the dreams in Dom are not. "I will lead her here," she says quietly, anchored by who she is. "And she'll tell you the truth."

"Are you promising that?" he asks, falling forward and pressing his chin along her collarbone. He reads her answer in the compelled tensing of her jaw. "I moved the burner phones into the basement," he says, and with the puffs of his breath on her skin she feels the other kind of distance stir and lighten and alter, even if it does not entirely close, the wheel having found its track.

 

* * *

 

"She's young," Mal tells him, feeling for the words. She cannot say it how she would like to: Phillipa is like Mal ten years ago, desperate for a way into dreamshare, possessed of all the aggressive vulnerability Mal slowly weaned herself from and more besides. "Bright, with a touch of madness. But the brokers haven't even heard of her."

"Works alone, then. Does your meeting have an ending time?"

Her lips quirk. "Is there a deadline? If I'm gone too long, will you chase her?"

"I wouldn't have to chase her," Dom says. "We have her number." He tilts his head back and begins to laugh in relief, then with a dazed honesty, when Mal catches him by his ear and adds, "Also, we know she likes you." 

 

* * *

 

What she loves most about this dream is not the weight of ownership. It's the sky on her shoulders, depthless and unfading and brighter than bone; how this jewel of a world flexes with her collar, answers her every move. Dom is building her an archway of linden as she walks. She sees a forest and lengthens her stride—

And then she wakes up. Her wrists are unmarred.

 _Why,_ she thinks, _would anyone who can dream choose to be shackled?_ Life can be so very unresponsive, more dreamlike than dreams ever are.

 

* * *

 

"I want to be clear with you," Phillipa says, the moment Mal folds herself into the corner chair beside her. She has already drunk her coffee, a telltale ring on the cafe's checkered saucers. They shake, very slightly, on the table. "Crystal. So I'll say this now. I won't force you, don't want to. I can't."

Mal could call this absurd, coming as it does from a girl who nearly ran her over the day before. She doesn't. _You will be fine, and so will Dom_ , she tells herself. Assertiveness is an incomplete substitute for experience, and Phillipa's voice has already dropped into the tones of familiarity. An adversary so confident Mal will agree to her proposal must have a valuable trade to offer. "How can I accept your reassurance when I don't know what you want?"

Phillipa's brows curve. "You'll be dreaming with me."

"Why?" Mal asks. "What do you want to know about dreaming that only I can teach you? Why"— _dreaming's the only thing you truly excel at,_ she thinks, and cannot bring herself to resent that—"would you trust me to?"

"You've a motive," Phillipa says. "I know what I did to Mr. Cobb, and why, damn it, don't underestimate me. I can fix it."

"Ah." The clarity of everything is as thin as filament, and closer to snapping. "A transaction, that's what you wanted." Once she would have gone with Phillipa freely. Now any price seems high.

"No. Not that. I wanted you to show me new strategies. You, once I'd proven to you what I could do." Her fingers are busy scratching at a crescent of dry coffee. "How mad are you? Are you going to rant about me fucking with people's heads?" When Mal glances downward, absorbing without noticing which joints Phillipa bends with each scritch, scritch, Phillipa's cheeks go pink, but her gaze is direct, challenging Mal to implicate herself in hypocrisy. 

"You hurt us badly," Mal says. She has acquired a measure of serenity between the broken window and Dom asleep on her stomach, and her precise syllables appear to unnerve Phillipa. Her legs kick forward beneath the table tiles and the extra napkin and the saucers. "The community doesn't do that, not to our own. And when you tried your hit-and-run, did you think of the shards flying, or crushing me under your tires? Real wounds?"

"I got carried away." Phillipa shuffles her feet. Mal remembers holding her first Sig Sauer, under, how easy it was to fire when shooting merely woke her up. "I guess we're not going to deal?"

"But you're young. I need Dom's future support more than vengeance. How can you be so sure of persuading him? You were a forgery. How can he know it's you?"

"You're one too, a forger. And Mr. Cobb would get the difference. He's always turned instinctively to you, hasn't he? I saw it. I really can't force you." Phillipa leans forward. "I couldn't've coerced him into staying, either, if he didn't want to, somehow."

There is a sizzle of tomato slices in oil to Mal's left, and to her right the leisurely clicks of checkers. Something that sounds like rain has begun behind her. She thinks about how the cafe would explode if this were a dream, whether she could stop herself from raining fork tines and the slashed handle of an expresso machine on Phillipa if she could, whether she would want to nonetheless. Whether there is space in her for Phillipa, the haunting of her impulsive younger self. The moment is like the moment a safebox opens during a heist: you can approximate what is inside, you have practiced the dial and envelope, it is not magic; yet in that moment you have been transformed by knowledge. She has a secret from Cobb, and a secret from Phillipa, and she feels smaller for keeping them both.

"What do you want to learn?" she asks.

"You can forge multiples," Phillipa says, "I want to do that, that blows my mind. You forge people you've never met. And—" this nearly a whisper, as though it is somehow less legitimate "—you've survived years of limbo."

"You cannot think of it as survival," Mal says. "That is how you become lost, when you admit that you are trying to escape from a level you don't believe belongs to you. When you dream, one level to the next, you must always choose the level you dream in."

Phillipa's eyes seem wet. Mal suspects she would prefer not to understand, not yet. "Can you teach me?"

"That cannot be taught. But," Mal says, and she can tell Phillipa can complete the sentence too. "I could show you."

Dom had earlier claimed a desire to buy groceries. His keys are making a surprisingly neat crown on the counter when Mal returns, Phillipa in tow. Phillipa hunches her shoulders and looks straight ahead through the foyer, however, so when Mal calls "Dom?" into the silent house and receives no indication he's there, she thinks there will be other days to introduce him to Phillipa in her own body. 

"Do you regret it?" she asks, for the alchemical effect it has on Phillipa. Her shoulders snap back, and her spine straightens like the homing of a compass. The conviction and intensity in the girl, the thrust of surfacing identity when Mal speaks of dreaming, or being denied it—it reminds her, suddenly, of Dom.

"I could have done otherwise," Phillipa says. Her voice peels down to the rawness of smoke; there is a genuineness to it Mal approves of, bedraggled and defiant as she is. "I would not do it again." 

Mal offers warm milk and brioche and guides her into the basement. The warbling of the robin outside falls away. The PASIV blinks sensibly in the dim light. "Ready?" she asks, although she ought also to address the question to people who are not with her.

"Yes, Mallorie."

"My name is Mal," she says, to see Phillipa curl it over her tongue and duck her chin. "And my husband is Dom. Please." Mal unravels the cannulae— _careful,_ she can hear Dom saying, _you don't want this to be the first job we screw up_. 

They sink together into the dream.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Alina, beta extraordinaire, and KT and N. for your encouragement and advice.
> 
> lilredridinghood, your prompts were lovely-- I apologize for putting them through a blender like this!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Escape Velocity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7573399) by [pendrecarc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc)




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